The Internet's core bandwidth continues to increase every year. Some of this additional bandwidth is consumed as more and more users access the Internet. Other additional bandwidth is consumed as existing users increase their use of the Internet. This increase of Internet use translates into an increase in traffic directed to and from World Wide Web (WWW) servers and other servers connected to the Internet.
Replacing a WWW server with a WWW server of twice the capacity is a costly undertaking. Adding additional WWW servers to a group of servers servicing requests is less costly but generally requires a traffic management device to distribute traffic. The traffic management device may be configured to distribute traffic to each server so that multiple servers can service requests.
With a sufficient amount of traffic between client computers and servers, a traffic management device can run out of memory used to store connection state information.